Murder is an Art

by Bill Crider

  He picked up a stack of American literature exams. He’d punish himself by grading them at home.

  * * *

  Sally changed for the aerobics class in her office. It was easier than going home, even though she lived so close. She could lock the door and have all the privacy she needed. She kept a gym bag under her desk, and the change didn’t take long at all. After class, she could drive home for a shower.

  The class was held in the choir room rather than the gym because the choir room was large enough for the class and there was a sound system already set up there. The choir director wasn’t fond of having his room used for what he referred to as a “sweaty exercise ritual” every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, but Dean Naylor had brushed his protests aside.

  The class was open to both men and women, but there were no men enrolled. Most of the women were there to get one hour’s credit toward the school’s two-hour physical education requirement. The men generally took bowling or weight training, but everyone had to take something. The administration at Hughes believed that sound minds and sound bodies went together.

  So did Sally, sort of. At any rate, she believed it enough to put in an enthusiastic eighty minutes or so twice a week, working out to sterile instrumental versions of old rock songs. She liked to think that the occasional Hershey bars were just melting right out of her system with every step she took, and whether or not this was true, it made her feel good to think so. She seldom missed a class.

  After changing, she pulled her office door shut and stepped into the hall, practically bumping into Jack Neville.

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” he said. “I, ah, didn’t see you coming out of your office. I guess I was thinking about these exams.”

  He held up the sheaf of papers that he was carrying in his right hand.

  Sally smiled. “That’s all right. I didn’t see you, either. I’m on my way to aerobics class.”

  “I, ah, see that you are. Those are nice, ah, leotards.”

  Jack was blushing, but Sally didn’t mind. It was nice to know that she could still have that effect on a man. She found herself wondering how Jorge would react in the same situation. Not like Jack, she decided.

  Jack walked down the hall beside her. “Don’t stop in the lounge,” he warned. “I saw Dr. Menton go in there earlier.”

  “I’ve already seen him,” Sally said. “He’s got transmission problems.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “I lied.”

  “Good idea.”

  They walked in silence after that until they got outside. The sun was getting low, but there was never much of a sunset in Hughes. Or if there was, it couldn’t be seen. The land was too flat, and there were too many houses in the way. But the sky was darkening, and the warmth of the day was beginning to give way to the comparative chill of the evening.

  “I’m going over to the Art and Music Building,” Sally said.

  “I know,” Jack said. “I mean, I know that’s where the aerobics classes are held. Not that I’ve ever been by there. It’s printed in the schedule.”

  He was talking too fast, and Sally stopped to look at him. “Why, Jack,” she said. “You’re getting red.”

  “It’s this evening air,” he said. “I’ve got to get on my way now. Lots of papers to grade.”

  He brandished the stack of papers again and fled the scene. Sally smiled as he trotted away.

  * * *

  Jack tossed the exams onto the seat of his three-year-old Corolla, got in, and closed the door. He certainly had handled that well, he told himself. About as well as the average fourteen-year-old, probably, if the fourteen-year-old was particularly socially inept.

  He decided that he needed a drink, so instead of going home, he drove to the Seahorse Club. There were no bars as such in Hughes. Some places sold beer, but hard liquor was available only in “private clubs.” There were several clubs, and all of them had extremely low membership fees. The one preferred by most of the Hughes faculty was the Seahorse, mainly because it was near the campus.

  When Jack went inside, he blinked his eyes to let them adjust to the dim light. After a second or so, he thought he saw Jorge Rodriguez and Vera Vaughn in a semiprivate booth in the back, but while Jack was still blinking, Troy Beauchamp beckoned from a nearby table where he was sitting with Samuel Winston.

  Winston had an owl-like stare and a bad attitude. Jack wasn’t sure what caused the stare, but the attitude was the result of the fact that Winston was teaching at a backwater community college in Texas rather than at Harvard, which was where he’d thought he’d wind up after his distinguished academic career. Harvard hadn’t been hiring, however, and neither had most of the other four-year institutions in the country. Or maybe Winston’s record wasn’t as sterling as he led people to believe. At any rate, he’d taken a job at Hughes and never left.

  Jack wasn’t especially fond of either Beauchamp or Winston, but he went over to the table.

  “Hey, Jack,” Beauchamp said. “Have a seat.”

  Winston wasn’t as enthusiastic, but he didn’t object, so Jack sat down.

  “Gin and tonic,” Beauchamp said, raising his glass. “Keeps down the incidence of malaria. What are you having?”

  “Gin and tonic sounds good.”

  A young blond waitress walked over and took his order. Jack knew that to be politically correct he should think of her as a server, but his mind just didn’t work that way. He was trying to change, however.

  “Heard about Val Hurley?” Troy asked when the waitress was gone.

  “No, what about him?”

  “Big trouble,” Winston said, shaking his head.

  Samuel Winston was a pedantic sort. No one ever called him Sam. Most afternoons, he could be found at the Seahorse, moistening his sorrows. He never even came close to drowning them.

  The waitress came back and put Jack’s drink down on a little white napkin.

  “Put it on my tab,” Troy said.

  Jack knew this meant that Troy would be assessing him when it was time to leave. Troy always volunteered to run a tab, and Jack, who wasn’t very good at math, had an uncomfortable suspicion that Troy generally made a slight profit from his friends.

  The waitress smiled and asked if Troy and Samuel wanted their drinks freshened. They didn’t.

  Jack took a sip of the gin and tonic and said, “So what kind of trouble is Val Hurley in?”

  “Aside from the Satanism?” Troy asked.

  Jack took another sip, a much bigger one this time. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said. “And tell me all about it.”

  11

  The next morning at quarter after nine, Sally was in her office speaking to Dean Naylor on the telephone, explaining to him that she hadn’t been able to reach the Thompsons.

  “I left a message yesterday afternoon,” she said. “And I called again last night from home. The machine picked up again, so I left another message. But they haven’t returned my calls.”

  “Call them again, right now,” Naylor said. “Dr. Fieldstone wants us to meet with them as soon as possible. In fact, he was hoping that we’d have a meeting set up for this morning.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Sally told him. “But if they won’t answer the phone or respond to my messages, I don’t know what we can do about it.”

  “We’d better do something,” Naylor said. “This is a very serious situation, and Dr. Fieldstone wants it resolved at once.”

  Sally hung up and sat for a moment, quietly fuming. She sensed that Naylor was somehow blaming her for the Thompsons’ failure to get back to her, and she didn’t like it. But it probably wasn’t Naylor’s fault. He was under pressure from Fieldstone.

  She picked up the phone and had started to dial the Thompsons’ number when a student appeared at her office door. He stood there looking at her expectantly, so she hung up the phone and asked if she could help him.

  “I guess so. You’re Dr. Good, right?”

  He w
as a skinny young man, about twenty, with a vacant look and a baseball cap that he wore backward, a custom that Sally couldn’t quite figure out. Did having the bill pointed in the wrong direction somehow help water drain off the cap better in the not infrequent rainstorms that visited the area? she wondered.

  “Yes, I’m Dr. Good,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I’m in Mr. Hurley’s nine o’clock class, and he hasn’t shown up. Some of us thought maybe he was sick, but no one has come to let us know. I figured that since you were the division chair, you’d know whether the class was cancelled.”

  Sally didn’t know. She was supposed to, however. Faculty members were required to notify their department chairs when they were going to be absent, and of course the department chair would notify the head of his or her division.

  Sally looked at her watch. It was nearly nine-twenty. Val had never been more than a few minutes late for his classes. She thought it might be a good idea to go over to the Art and Music Building.

  “What class is it?” she asked.

  “Art Appreciation.”

  That meant a fairly sizable class. Lots of students took Art Appreciation to satisfy part of their core-curriculum requirements.

  “Is the rest of the class waiting?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Some of ’em left, but most of ’em are still there. Mr. Hurley doesn’t like absences.”

  “Let’s walk over there, then. If Mr. Hurley’s not there when we get there, I’ll have everyone sign a roll sheet and give it to him. He’s probably had car trouble.”

  She hoped that was all it was. These days, nearly everyone had a cellular phone, and she was sure that Val was no different. Even if he’d had trouble on the road, he could have called to let her know he’d be late.

  She walked over to the Art and Music Building with the student trailing along behind. The classrooms were on the second floor, beside the art gallery, and when she got there, the lecture room was partially filled with students who were talking, reading, laughing, and probably not thinking very much about art. Val Hurley was nowhere to be seen.

  Sally went to the front of the room and announced that it seemed Mr. Hurley was going to be late. Several of the students groaned aloud.

  “I can’t believe I got up and drove over here for this,” said a young man in the front row. “This is my only class until noon. I coulda slept three more hours.”

  “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Sally said. She looked in the desk and found a sheet of notebook paper. “I’ll pass around this paper for you to sign so Mr. Hurley will know you made the effort to be here in case he can’t make it.”

  “More of an effort than he did,” said the boy in the front row. “That’s for sure.”

  Sally let it go. She didn’t like it when faculty members had to miss class without notice, especially ones like Val, who put such an emphasis on student attendance. In his Art Appreciation classes, he even tied attendance to the final grade.

  The students began gathering up their books as soon as they’d signed the roll. Sally couldn’t understand why Val, who was already in trouble, would do something that would upset her and everyone in the administration who found out about it. Not that she would report him. She was used to covering for her faculty.

  After everyone had signed the roll, Sally folded the paper and put it in her purse. She’d drop it in the faculty mail for Val later. She left the classroom and went out through the gallery, pausing this time to look again at some of the pictures. That was when she noticed that one of them was missing.

  The one of the goat.

  She suddenly got a hollow feeling in her stomach. Val was missing and so was the painting. There was something ominous about that.

  The art offices were at the base of the T-shaped gallery, on either side of the entrance to one of the studios. There were only two offices because Hughes had a small art faculty. Very small, in fact. Val was the only full-time member of the department. He hired part-time instructors to teach the rest of the classes.

  Sally walked the length of the gallery and knocked on Val’s door. There was no answer, so she tried the knob. The door was locked, as she’d expected, but she saw Angelina Sanchez, one of the maintenance crew, in the hallway mopping up a spill. She asked Angelina to come in and open the office door.

  And that was how she and Angelina came to discover the body of the late Val Hurley.

  12

  Jack Neville had come to take a look at the student art exhibit and was signing his name in the visitors’ register when he heard Sally’s voice coming from Val Hurley’s office. Curious, Jack stepped around the corner and looked into the office.

  Sally was talking to someone on the phone, but it wasn’t Val Hurley. Val was lying on the floor, right beside his brand new chair. Straddling him was Angelina Sanchez, attempting to administer CPR.

  Jack’s first thought was that Val must have had a heart attack, though Jack wouldn’t have considered Val a prime candidate for such a fate. Val was very careful about his diet, didn’t smoke, and—aside from his current dalliance with Vera Vaughn—didn’t take any unnecessary chances with his health.

  Jack was about to say something when he saw a statuette of Winged Victory lying on the floor not far from Val’s head. There was something that looked a lot like blood on the base of the statuette, and there was blood in Val’s hair. Jack was no Sherlock Holmes, but he was suddenly pretty sure that Val’s current situation wasn’t due to any health-related problems.

  Sally set the phone in its cradle and immediately picked it up again. Jack watched her punch in a 9 for an outside line and then 9-1-1. He listened as she told the dispatcher where to send the ambulance and the police.

  Jack knelt down next to Val and felt his neck, trying to locate one of the carotid arteries. There was no pulse, not the faintest flicker. Val was waxy cold.

  “I don’t think CPR is going to do him any good,” Jack said.

  Angelina looked up at him and brushed a strand of black hair back from her face.

  “You’re right. I just thought it would be good to try.”

  Both Jack and Angelina stood up and waited for Sally to finish her call. It didn’t take her long.

  When she hung up, Jack asked, “What’s going on?”

  Sally said, “Val’s dead, I think. I’m going to call Eric Desmond. Would you mind dismissing Val’s class?”

  “He’s dead, all right,” Jack said, admiring Sally’s calm demeanor. He didn’t feel at all calm himself, and he wished he could be as composed as she seemed to be. “Where’s the class being held?”

  Sally told him, and he went to the classroom. He informed the students who were still there that Mr. Hurley was ill, which was true enough, depending on how you looked at it, and said that they should check the syllabus for their next assignment.

  “We don’t have a syllabus,” said a young woman in the second row. A gold stud stood out from her right nostril like a large pimple.

  “Well, then,” Jack said, “just consider that today’s assignment will be carried over until next time.”

  “Will Mr. Hurley be back?” someone asked from the back of the room.

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said, thinking about Val’s bloody head and not wanting to lie. “But you can be sure that someone will be here to teach you.”

  “I hope so,” the girl with the nose stud said. “I paid good money for this class.”

  No one paid her much attention. Everyone else was too busy gathering up notebooks and getting out of there.

  When everyone had left, Jack went back down to Val’s office. Sally, or someone, had closed the door. Jack didn’t know whether to go in, knock, or just leave. He’d about decided to leave when the door of the gallery opened and Eric Desmond sauntered in.

  Desmond was head of the Hughes Community College Security Office, or, in other words, the chief of the campus police. He didn’t look like a cop, however—or at least not like what Jack thought c
ops should look like. First-time visitors to the campus often thought Desmond must be the president until they heard his title. He dressed almost as well as Harold Fieldstone, though a good bit flashier, and he was a fanatical fitness buff. Desmond could be seen on the college track every day at noon, running anywhere from five to eight miles. He also worked out in the weight room for at least an hour a day, watched his diet, and took handfuls of vitamins with every meal. He was ruggedly handsome, and although he was nearly sixty years old, he didn’t look much over forty.

  “Where’s the body?” he asked Jack.

  Desmond’s voice was as calm as Sally’s had been, maybe calmer. Jack decided that other people were simply better at dealing with emergencies than he was.

  Jack pointed a thumb at the closed door. “In the office. Dr. Good’s in there. Ms. Sanchez is with her. She tried CPR, but it didn’t do any good.”

  “Too bad,” Desmond said. “Hurley was an okay guy.” He paused for a moment as if out of respect, and then continued. “I don’t think you should hang around here, Neville. This is police business now.”

  “I might be able to help,” Jack said, immediately wondering why he’d opened his mouth. He couldn’t think of a thing he could do.

  Desmond shrugged. “All right, you can stay, but keep out of the office. In fact, if you want to be useful, why don’t you go to the parking lot and keep a lookout for the locals? Dr. Good says she gave them a call, and they should be here in a few minutes. There’ll be an ambulance, too.”

  Jack nodded and left the gallery. The parking lot was on the other side of the building, and he walked around there, stood in the sunshine, and waited.

  It wasn’t long before the ambulance arrived. Jack sent the EMTs up to Val’s office and continued to wait. Within minutes, a big white Chevrolet came roaring into the lot and squealed to a stop in a “No Parking” zone not far from where he stood. The words Hughes Police Department were painted on the side of the car in red and blue script.

  Two officers got out of the car, one in uniform and one in plain clothes. The uniformed cop glanced over at the ambulance and then asked where the crime scene was. Jack volunteered to take the two men there, and they trooped up the stairs behind him, neither of them saying a word. Jack figured they didn’t have anything to say to civilians.